Thursday, December 31, 2015

Horror High (1974)

A no-nonsense fright flick
so derivative and simple-minded that it’s charming in a goofy kind of way, Horror High transposes the central
gimmick of Robert Louis Stevenson’s deathless 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde into an adolescent milieu—a
victimized nerd uses chemicals to transform himself into a monster, and then he
goes on a killing spree to eliminate his tormentors. Predictable subplots
include the nerd’s relationship with a pretty girl whom he’s initially too shy
to ask on a date, and the efforts of a police detective to catch the killer. As
in many low-budget horror pictures, logic is not spoken here. Obvious clues
connect the deaths to the protagonist, and yet nobody puts the pieces together
until the very end of the story. Officials leave the school open despite the
presence of a murderer who is systematically eliminating faculty members and
other employees. You get the idea. Horror
High is the type of picture that requires the viewer to deactivate
cognitive-reasoning abilities and simply go with the ridiculous flow.

That
being the case, Horror High is
probably only palatable for fans of old-fashioned monster pictures, because the
narrative and visual signifiers—archetypal characters, familiar situations,
gruesome murders, shadowy cinematography, wild Dutch angles—all emerge from the
same genre soup as, say, old Universal Studios creature features and 1950s
drive-in distractions. In other words, the fact that there’s nothing even
remotely special about Horror High
works in its favor, because the picture delivers the same comfort-food
sensations that have satisfied viewers’ animal brains for decades. (Example:
The monster takes out an abusive gym coach by stomping the man to death while
wearing sneakers with metal cleats.) Most of the actors are nobodies who render
forgettable work, though Austin Stoker, later to achieve cult fame by starring
in John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct
13 (1976), plays the policeman investigating the nerd’s bloody handiwork.
And while the exuberant rock music during the finale adds a fun little charge,
many elements are decidedly substandard; for instance, the monster makeup that
gangly leading man Pat Cardi wears during his rampages is so unimpressive that
director Larry N. Stouffer barely ever shows the makeup. Wise move.

1 comment:

Happy 2016 -- and I remember this! It turned up on the local late show, except with the title Twisted Brain. I sort of think of this as a male Carrie -- without any of Carrie's imagination or intensity, of course.